Raspberry Strudel: My Raspberry Pi in Austria

Kyle Rankin — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 19:31:39 +0000

I remember my first colocated server rather fondly. It was a 1U Supermicro that had been decommissioned from my employer after a few years' service. Although it was too old and slow for my company, the 800MHz CPU, 1GB RAM and 36GB SCSI storage was perfect for my needs back in 2005. A friend was kind enough to allow me to colocate the server at his facility for free. So, after a lot of planning, I installed and configured Debian, generated SSH keys and set IPs so I could manage this machine remotely. Once it was colocated, it became my primary server for Web, DNS, SMTP and my perpetual Irssi-in-a-screen session. The machine served me for more than five years until I ultimately replaced it with newer hardware.

Fast-forward to today, and although my primary server has significantly more resources, I just finished colocating a new server, again for free, and again with similar resources as my old Supermicro: 900MHz CPU, 256MB RAM and 40GB Flash storage. This time though, the server is a Raspberry Pi, and the facility is located in Austria. In this article, I explain how I was able to colocate a Raspberry Pi and the steps I went through to prepare it for remote management.

The Deal

When I first saw the deal advertised, I couldn't believe my eyes. An Austrian colocation facility, EDIS GmbH, was offering free Raspberry Pi colocation. Although I was a bit skeptical, I carefully read through the fine print, but it was pretty clear. If you set up an account, the EDIS GmbH folks would send you network information for your Raspberry Pi. Once you configured the network settings, you would send the Raspberry Pi along with the SD card, USB cable and optionally a small USB thumbdrive and they would rack it and provide 100Gb/month of traffic on a 100Mb connection. They even offered free remote power cycling of the server as long as you were fine with waiting 24–48 hours. I figured the worst that could happen is that I'm out a $35 Raspberry Pi and some Flash storage, so I signed up and set aside a Raspberry Pi, 8GB SD card and 32GB thumbdrive while I waited for my IP information.

The Setup

I'm no stranger to colocating servers without remote management. Although I certainly prefer servers that provide remote lights-out management, beggars can't be choosers, so many of my personal servers have had to make do with SSH and the ability to have someone cycle the power. Although I wasn't sure how I would use the server, I did know I wanted to keep the OS relatively lightweight. I also didn't want to take too many chances with a machine I would have little access to, so I went with the standard Raspbian "wheezy" Debian distribution linked to on the Raspberry Pi download page. There already is plenty of documentation on how to set up Raspbian, so I don't go into that here. Instead, I focus on the changes I made to the distribution before I shipped it off.

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Remote Management

Raspberry Strudel: My Raspberry Pi in Austria

The Deal

The Setup